By LESLEY CLARK McClatchy

Published 12:01 am, Thursday, August 18, 2011

ATKINSON, Ill. -- President Barack Obama will seek to set Washington's agenda in September by calling for new efforts to spur job growth and even deeper cuts in future federal budget deficits than called for in the widely panned deal he struck last month with lawmakers.

Speaking Wednesday at a town hall meeting in Illinois, his home state, Obama said he'll continue to press for new tax revenue as he asks congressional negotiators to go beyond the $1.5 trillion in future deficit reductions that a special bipartisan joint congressional committee is charged with identifying.

"It doesn't require radical surgery for us to fix it," Obama said. "It just requires us all taking an approach that says we're a family, and all of us are going to share a little bit in the burden, and those of us who are most fortunate -- we can do a little bit more."

Obama's remarks came at the close of a three-day bus trip across the Midwest. With his re-election bid shadowed by the nation's stubbornly high unemployment rate, White House officials said Obama plans to deliver a major speech on jobs and the economy when he and Congress return to Washington in September from their summer recess.

Obama was to arrive back in Washington on Wednesday and depart the next day for 10 days at Martha's Vineyard.

Obama didn't mention his coming bid for new jobs initiatives at his first stop of the day in rural Illinois, but a senior administration official said the jobs package is likely to include a mix of tax cuts, construction projects to put the unemployed back to work and measures targeting the long-term unemployed.

Officials said Obama plans to spend the fall pushing for the measures -- likely while reiterating his charge this week that "partisan brinksmanship" in Washington is hampering job growth. They said he'll offer a detailed deficit-reduction plan to the super-committee that would cover the cost of the jobs measures while cutting deficits deeper than prescribed so far.

Republicans from the House of Representatives and the Senate said Wednesday that they remain dead set against any tax revenues as part of an attack on deficits, calling instead for cutting regulations and passing trade bills as a way to spur economic growth and jobs.

Also Wednesday, Texas Gov. Rick Perry introduced himself to voters in Bedford, N.H., carving a sharp divide between the newest Republican presidential contender and front-runner Mitt Romney on the issue of climate change. While Romney believes that the world is getting warmer and that humans are contributing to that pattern, Perry called global warming "a scientific theory that has not been proven."

Taking questions Wednesday morning at the storied Politics and Eggs breakfast, Perry was asked about a passage in his book "Fed Up!" in which he writes that there have been "doctored data" behind the science on global warming and accuses former Vice President Al Gore, who won a Nobel Peace Prize for his call to action on climate change, of being a "false prophet of a secular carbon cult."

According to the Washington Post, Perry responded: "I do think global warming has been politicized. . . . We are seeing almost weekly or even daily scientists are coming forward and questioning the original idea that man-made global warming is what is causing our climate to change. Yes, our climate has changed. It has been changing ever since the Earth was formed. But I do not buy into a group of scientists who have, in some cases, been found to be manipulating data."